When I was in college, one of my apartment-mates came into my room with his friend and asked to look at my globe. He was trying to find Greece.
I pointed to Europe, and he still couldn’t find it. He said, “Italy’s the boot, right?” I said “yes” and showed him where Greece was located.
Now this guy graduated with straight A’s in Accounting in the #1 Accounting school in the nation at the time. He received job offers from all of the big 8 Accounting firms after graduation.
He just never bothered to learn any Geography.
OK, here’s my question for everybody: What’s the sine of forty five degrees? Exactly.
Of course I realize that a small fraction of adults can answer that question off the top of their head, but that just means that very few people know anything about anything, because if you don’t know this, you don’t know nuttin’ about nuttin’
He just never bothered to learn any Geography.”
Your roomie sounds like Sherlock Holmes (the following from “A Study in Scarlet”):
“My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
‘You appear to be astonished,’ he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. ‘Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.’
‘To forget it!’
‘You see,’ he explained, ‘I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.’
‘But the Solar System’ I protested.
‘What the deuce is it to me?’ he interrupted impatiently: ‘you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.’”
Perhaps twenty years ago, I read a lengthy, scholarly article on the difference between geography as we perceive it and geography as it exists, and how perceived geography affects us.
The article started off with perhaps a fifty-question quiz, starting with the easier questions such as "which is further north, London or Seattle?", then going into more difficult comparative questions, or questions about distances within a hundred miles, or whether A was further from B than C, or if A was closer to B than C was to D. If you cheated and checked your answers after the first few, you realized that the gut-instinct answer was almost never right.
There's geography as it exists and geography as we perceive it.